T. De Witt Talmage eBook

to the survivors to see it about them. I saw a
human body taken out of the ruins as if it had been
a stick of wood. No crowd gathered about it.
Some workmen a hundred feet away did not stop their
work to see. The devastation was far worse than
was ever told. The worst part of it could not
even be seen. The heart-wreck was the unseen tragedy
of this unfortunate American city. From Brooklyn
I helped to send temporary relief. With a wooden
box in my hand I, with others, collected from the
bounty of that vast meeting in the Academy of Music.
The exact amount paid over by our relief committee
in all was $95,905. There was no end to the demand
upon one’s energy in all directions.

I was called upon in September, 1888, to lay the corner
stone of the First Presbyterian Church at Far-Rockaway,
and amid the imposing ceremonies I predicted the great
future of Long Island. It seemed to me that Long
Island would some day be the London of America, filled
with the most prominent churches of the country.

While in the plans of others I was an impulse at least
towards success, in my own plans, how often I have
been scourged and beaten to earth. As it had
been before, so it was in this zenith of my personal
progress. To my amazement, chagrin and despair,
on the morning of October 13, 1889, our beautiful
church was again burned to the ground.

THE FOURTEENTH MILESTONE

1889-1891

For fifteen years, to a large part of the public,
I had been an experiment in church affairs. In
1889 I had caught up with the world and the things
I had been doing and thinking and hoping became suitable
for the world. In the retrospect of those things
I had left behind what gratitude I felt for their
strife and struggle! A minister of the Gospel
is not only a sentinel of divine orders, he must also
have deep convictions of his authority to resist attack
in his own way, by his own force, with his own strength
and faith. When, on June 3, 1873, I laid the
corner-stone of the new tabernacle, I dedicated the
sacred building as a stronghold against rationalism
and humanitarianism. I knew then that this statement
was regarded as questionable orthodoxy, and I myself
had become the curious symbol of a new religion.
Still I pursued my course, an independent sentry on
the outskirts of the old religious camping-ground,
but inspired with the converting grace I had received
in my boyhood, my duty was clearly not so much a duty
of regulations as it was a conception, a sympathy,
a command to the Christian needs of the human race.